Post your ideas and and condolences.
My sincere condoleances, to lighten your sorrow have a look at below replacement suggestion.
This is the successor of my HP laptop (I have Ryzen 7 5700U with CPU benchmark 15.3K but when I tested it, it scored 18K). The 7730U is at least 10% faster
After you bought your new laptop
1. Install Linux Mint 22.3 (go cold Turkey no dual boot, but go Linux all the way).
2. Remove software you don't need
3. Add Firejail additional profiles for desk accessoires (only 1 command)
4. Use only flatpak versions
a) Install Flatseal (reduce permissions)
b) Install Flatsweep (remove leftovers of flatpak's you de-installed)
5. Move to Brave Origin (free on linux) and install your choice of extensions (include Download Sentinel for extra download protection)
6. Reduce swappiness (to 10%) with 16GB you have enough headroom, forget other optimizations (make sure GPU use is allowed in flatpak with flatseal)
7. Do some mild hardening (disable P2P, old TLS, enable ASLR system wide and disable execute permission popup for text files)
8. Make sure Timeshift backups to different partition, install FreeFileSync for data backup.
Get comfortable with Linux Mint for a few weeks and finish Linux security setup
9. Install LittleSnitch outbound application firewall
10. Install FaPolicyD (exclude root and add update of whitelist after installs/updates) using AI
Disclaimer (warning from own experience)
After three months, you start wondering why are all those Windows users so obsessed with security, what is the fuzz about AI and ads?
You probably also start to have some serious withdrawal problems (e.g. wakening in the middle of the night and asking yourself why haven't I tweaked my OS or applications lately?), but as time comes you start to enjoy the boredom of seamless PC usage OR you will be infected by CDHS (Continuous Distro Hopping Syndrome) decease because you can´t suppress the need to tweak your OS and apps.
The last is a serious risk: as far as I know only
@nicolaasjan and I are the only ones not caught by the CDHS but recently
@TuxTalk (is sticking to Ubunto Pro) and
@lokamoka820 (posted he stopped distro hopping) have overwon CDHS, but I think your "stay safe not paranoid priciple¨ will help to stay out of CDHS-worries
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